Trying to Upgrade from Vista to Windows 7 – Take 2

My second attempt to upgrade from Vista to the Windows 7 Release Candidate ends in failure – again. The reason for the failure remains a mystery!

So this weekend I set aside a block of time (roughly 5 hours) when I wouldn’t need my computer so I could take a stab at trying to upgrade from Windows Vista to Windows 7 (again).

This time, I moved my Documents, Music, Pictures, and Videos (which constitute the bulk of my user profile) into a separate folder on my 2nd hard drive for safe keeping, and then used a 2nd user account to delete the directory junction that linked my user profile to my 2nd hard drive. Then, I moved my (now much smaller) user profile back on to the boot drive (C:), and began the upgrade process again.

The last time I tried this, I thought that the reason the upgrade failed was because of my use of a directory junction to put my user profile onto my 2nd hard drive. So this time, I thought I’d have better luck, since the link was gone and everything was back where Windows probably expected it to be.

Unfortunately, the result of this second attempt was the same as my first attempt: FAILURE. The only difference is that this time the upgrade didn’t take as long (probably because my user profile was so much smaller). However, it still failed in exactly the same way – it got all the way to the very last step of the installation, and then quit, saying:

“The upgrade was not successful. Your previous version of Windows is being restored.”

It then spent some time rolling back the upgrade, leaving me back where I started. When my desktop came back up, I was greeted by this message:

“This version of Windows could not be installed. Your previous version of Windows has been restored, and you can continue to use it.”

No clue as to the reason for the failed upgrade – that’s my next task.

I don’t want to admit defeat (i.e., do a clean install) – an upgrade from Vista Ultimate 32-bit to Windows 7 RC 32-bit should work just fine. I guess I’m going to have to spend some time spelunking through arcane log files to see if I can find out the root cause of the failed upgrade – wish me luck!!

14 thoughts on “Trying to Upgrade from Vista to Windows 7 – Take 2”

There are precious few people discussing this problem on the web – my searches turn up nothing (except for the occasional bit of “just do a clean install” advice – which I think is a cop-out).

If I find a solution, I will be sure to write about it – of that you can be certain! Of course, given how much time it takes to “try” each upgrade, I don’t know if I’ll be trying again any time soon. But, we’ll see…

Did anyone get anywhere with this? My system was originally Windows XP Pro, upgraded to Windows Vista Business. I have tried twice to upgrade to Windows 7 Ultimate with no luck. Both times I received the standard “This version of windows could not be installed”. I have ran the Windows 7 upgrade advisor many times. There are no problems found with the upgrade other than a couple of software programs that “may not work correctly” after the upgrade.

So far, I don’t think anyone has had any luck with this – there’s a question over on SuperUser.com that might give you some insight, or give you an idea for an approach to take.

But I don’t have much in the way of hope anymore – I haven’t been able to figure it out (and I’m pretty savvy, being geek and programmer), and even the collective wisdom of a whole bunch of really smart geeks (via the question over on SuperUser.com) couldn’t resolve the issue… so… yeah, I don’t have much hope, unless someone REALLY smart from Microsoft steps in directly to help us!

By the way; this isn’t really a support forum – and just dumping your long, long, incredibly long log file and asking us to take a look at it is kind of… rude? So, you might want to try your luck at an actual support site, such as SuperUser.com. I know they have several open issues there for upgrading to Windows 7.

Try looking over on SuperUser.com, and if they don’t have anything, ask a question there. There are way, way more smart people over there, and the site is meant for questions like “why can’t I upgrade to Windows 7?”

I’m always searching into stuff about information that I do not know about. It’s not an easy task to search things that you do not know about, because what do you look for? 😉 Your blog is the type of thing I love to read about regarding something new to me. Nice share! Thank you.

One possible cause of the error “this version of windows could not be installed” is a bad driver. If a driver “crashes” during the install, the Windows 7 upgrade will eventually fail, Windows Vista will be rolled back and the error “this version of windows could not be installed” will appear on the screen.
I was able to track down a bad driver on my system that was causing my upgrade to fail. After uninstalling the software that used that driver, the Windows 7 install succeeded. In my case, the driver that was crashing was the klim6.sys driver which is part of the Kaspersky 2010 virus software. After uninstalling Kaspersky (and making no other changes) the install of Windows 7 succeeded.
So, if you are having this problem, and you have Kaspersky 2010 installed… Then remove it and try again.
If you do not have Kaspersky installed, then use the following steps to identify the driver with the problem:
1. After the Windows 7 install fails and rolls back to vista _do not reboot_, open the following directory:
c:\$windows.~bt\sources\
2. Search this directory for any files with an extension of .dmp
3. In my case the file was called setupmem.dmp
4. If you have a .dmp file, then you’ll need to open it with WinDBG. If you don’t have a dump file, then your problem is probably not related to a bad driver.
5. Download the WinDBG tool from:http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/devtools/debugging/default.mspx
6. You can choose to do a custom install and install just the debugging tools (not all of the redistributable packages and header files)
7. Start up WinDBG. WinDBG is a powerful, feature rich program with arcane commands, none of which you need to use to find the bad driver.
8. In WinDBG, select Open Crash Dump File and open your .dmp file.
9. In the text that flies by, you should see a file such as XXXX.SYS identified as the cause of the crash. In my case it was the file klim6.sys
10. Google or Bing for the sys file to find out what it is and how you can either update the file or remove it from your system.
11. Do so.
12. Run Windows 7 upgrade again.

Wow, thanks for the info – I would have thought that we’d get a more meaningful error message if there was a problem with a driver during an upgrade. As it is, trying to figure out what went wrong is almost an exercise in futility – there’s just too little information available to diagnose the problem.

Still, it is good that you mentioned the problem with bad drivers. Maybe this will help someone someday who is having the same problem. Thanks!